Quotes by French Authors - Page 42

Painting calmed the chaos that shook my soul.
Niki De Saint Phalle
Equilibrium is the state of death, only chaos produces lifeThe Ancient Greeks have been driven to extinction by too much search for architectural harmony.
Stéphane Lupasco
In chaos, there is fertility.
Anaïs Nin
By appreciation, we make excellence in others our own property.
Voltaire
Their arrogance protected them against any liking for their fellow-man, against the slightest interest in the strangers sitting all about them, amidst whom M. de Stermaria adopted the manner one has in the buffet-car of a train, grim, hurried, stand-offish, brusque, fastidious and spiteful, surrounded by other passengers whom one has never seen before, whom one will never see again and towards whom the only conceivable way of behaving is to make sure that they keep away from one's cold chicken and stay out of one's chosen corner-seat.
Marcel Proust
When the same qualities which we admire in ourselves are seen in others, even though they be superior, maliciously lower and carp at them.
John Calvin
How tolerable misfortunes appear when they affect only other people! How strong the human body seems when it's another man's flesh that bleeds! How easy it is to look death in the face when it's another man's turn!
Irène Némirovsky
Oh, mankind, race of crocodiles! How well I recognize you down there, and how worthy you are of yourselves!
Alexandre Dumas
The word 'love,' used in connection with the reproduction of our species, is the most odious blasphemy taught in our times.
Honoré de Balzac
Of course I love you. It is my fault that you have not known it all the while" (the flower to little prince)
Antoine De Saint Exupery
...For I do now know that it is cowardly. We do not have the right to think only of poetry on this earth. It is magical, but utterly selfish.
Hélène Berr
To be happy, we must not be too concerned with others.
Albert Camus
Nothing resembles selfishness more closely than self-respect
George Sand
Il n'est pas certain que tout soit incertain.(Translation: It is not certain that everything is uncertain.)
Blaise Pascal
To win without risk is to triumph without glory.
Pierre Corneille
Everyone seems inspired by some religion that promises fulfillment. Within the clashing words we are all expressing the same impulses. We are divided over methods which are the fruit of our reasoning, but not over our goals, which are identical.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
You are worth everything that nature can give you.And I pray to whatever I believe in that you find your happiness. You find pride in yourself.And you find true love.And you can look at that person and understand the impact that have had in your life.Because you have surprised me with every step you took.And if letting you go means that I love you.Then I love you.Have fun out there.
Philippe Renaud
Since the same human mire remains beneath, does not all civilisation reduce itself to the superiority of smelling nice and living well?
Émile Zola
A civilization, when the moment has come for crowds to acquire a high hand over it, is at the mercy of too many chances to endure for long. Could anything postpone for a while the hour of its ruin, it would be precisely the extreme instability of the opinions of crowds and their growing indifference and lack of respect for all general beliefs.
Gustave Le Bon
The cities make ferocious men because they may corrupt man. The mountain, the sea, the forest, make savage men; they development fierce side, but often without destroying the humane side.
Victor Hugo
Those who haven't been exposed to the hypocrisies of a civilized education react to things 'naturally', as they happen. It is in the here and now that they are either happy or unhappy, joyful or sad, interested or indifferent.
Henri Charrière
The equality prescribed by the Revolution is simply the weak man's revenge upon the strong; it's just what we saw in the past, but in reverse; that everyone should have his turn is only meet. And it shall be turnabout again tomorrow, for nothing in Nature is stable and the governments men direct are bound to prove as changeable and ephemeral as they.
Marquis de Sade
The more civilization progresses, the hollower it becomes and the easier to destroy it.
Empress Eugenie of France
You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you find absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world.
Octave Mirbeau
We look to Scotland for all our ideas of civilisation.
Voltaire
But the guilty person is only one of the targets of punishment. For punishment is directed above all at others, at all the potentially guilty.
Michel Foucault
But sometimes it is just when everything seems to be lost that we experience a presentiment that may save us; one has knocked on all the doors which lead nowhere, and then, unwittingly, one pushes against the only one through which one may enter and for which one would have searched in vain for a hundred years, and it opens.
Marcel Proust
And as for myself, I tell you, I have had too much luck these last years. Do you believe that a man's luck can run forever? I know that it can't. For myself, I must somehow erect a bulwark against the ill fortune that is certain.
Gontran De Poncins
...luck is not to be coerced.
Albert Camus
Ability is of little account without opportunity.
Napoléon Bonaparte
Our worst misfortunes never happen, and most miseries lie in anticipation.
Honoré de Balzac
Imagine all contradictions, all possible incompatibilities--you will find them in the government, in the law-courts, in the churches, in the public shows of this droll nation.
Voltaire
I think being condemned to death is the only real distinction," said Mathilde. "It is the only thing which cannot be bought.
Stendhal
The passion for defiling things was inborn in her. It was not enough for her to destroy them, she had to soil them too.
Émile Zola
Every phenomenon is a corrupt version of another, largerphenomenon: time, a disease of eternity; history, a disease oftime; life, again, a disease of matter.Then what is normal, what is healthy? Eternity? Which itselfis only an infirmity of God.
Emil M. Cioran
We know something about billionaire consumption, but it is hard to measure some of it. Some billionaires are consuming politicians, others consume reporters, and some consume academics...
Thomas Piketty
Prospero, you are the master of illusion.Lying is your trademark.And you have lied so much to me(Lied about the world, lied about me)That you have ended by imposing on meAn image of myself.Underdeveloped, you brand me, inferior,That s the way you have forced me to see myselfI detest that image! What’s more, it’s a lie!But now I know you, you old cancer,And I know myself as well.
Aimé Césaire
This is, to me, the loveliest and saddest landscape in the world. It is the same as that on the preceding page, but I have drawn it again to impress it on your memory. It is here that the little prince appeared on Earth, and disappeared.Look at it carefully so that you will be sure to recognise it in case you travel some day to the African desert. And, if you should come upon this spot, please do not hurry on. Wait for a time, exactly under the star. Then, if a little man appears who laughs, who has golden hair and who refuses to answer questions, you will know who he is. If this should happen, please comfort me. Send me word that he has come back.
Antoine De Saint Exupery
Will it be here that we shall find a place which will not elude us, or which if it remains does not exert on us a culpable attraction? Or must we, leaning over the deck and watching the shores glide by, move forever onward?
André Gide
Vodka goes well with a wintery perspective. Nothing else provokes such presentiments of falling snow except, for some, the communist seizure of the state.
Michèle Bernstein
The twentieth century will have taught us that no doctrine in itself is necessarily a liberating force: all of them may be perverted or take a wrong turning; all have blood on their hands - communism, liberalism, nationalism, each of the great religions, and even secularism. Nobody has a monopoly on humane values.
Amin Maalouf
From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
Louis Blanc
Who is the true friend of the people? Fascism is. Who has done the most for the working man? The USSR or Hitler? Hitler has... Who has done the most for the small businessman? Not Thorez but Hitler!
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
I would say, if you like, that the party is like an out-moded mathematics...that is to say, the mathematics of Euclid. We need to invent a non-Euclidian mathematics with respect to political discipline.
Alain Badiou
The control of the production of wealth is the control of human life itself.
Hilaire Belloc
Jean's desires, like those of all men in love, were concentrated on the impossible.
Marcel Proust
He thought of that heroic Colonel Pontmercy . . . who had left upon every field of victory in Europe drops of that same blood which he, Marius, had in his veins, who had grown grey before his time in discipline and in command, who had lived with his sword-belt buckled, his epaulets falling on his breast, his cockade blackened by powder, his forehead wrinkled by the cap, in the barracks, in the camp, in the bivouac, in the ambulance, and who after twenty years had returned from the great wars with his cheek scarred, his face smiling, simple, tranquil, admirable, pure as a child, having done everything for France and nothing against her.
Victor Hugo
The medals of the dead heroes are the coins for the future. (Les médailles des héros morts - Sont les pièces pour l'avenir.)
Charles de Leusse
The devotion of one man had given strength and courage to all.
Victor Hugo
Swann could at once detect in this story one of those fragments of literal truth which liars, when taken by surprise, console themselves by introducing into the composition of the falsehood which they have to invent, thinking that it can be safely incorporated, and will lend the whole story an air of verisimilitude.
Marcel Proust
But the lies which Odette ordinarily told were less innocent, and served to prevent discoveries which might have involved her in the most terrible difficulties with one or another of her friends. And so, when she lied, smitten with fear, feeling herself to be but feebly armed for her defence, unconfident of success, she was inclined to weep from sheer exhaustion, as children weep sometimes when they have not slept. She knew, also, that her lie, as a rule, was doing a serious injury to the man to whom she was telling it, and that she might find herself at his mercy if she told it badly. Therefore she felt at once humble and culpable in his presence. And when she had to tell an insignificant, social lie its hazardous associations, and the memories which it recalled, would leave her weak with a sense of exhaustion and penitent with a consciousness of wrongdoing.
Marcel Proust
In Swann's mind, however, these words, meeting no opposition, settled and hardened until they assumed the indestructibility of a truth so indubitable that, if some friend happened to tell him that he had come by the same train and had not seen Odette, Swann would have been convinced that it was his friend who had made a mistake as to the day or hour, since his version did not agree with the words uttered by Odette. These words had never appeared to him false except when, before hearing them, he had suspected that they were going to be. For him to believe that she was lying, and anticipatory suspicion was indispensable.
Marcel Proust
In my view you cannot claim to have seen something until you have photographed it.
Émile Zola
Sharpness is a bourgeois concept
Henri Cartier-Bresson
A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.
Roland Barthes
I believe that, through the act of living, the discovery of oneself is made concurrently with the discovery of the world around us, which can mold us, but which can also be affected by us. A balance must be established between these two worlds—the one inside us and the one outside us.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
To take photographs is to hold one's breath when all faculties converge in the face of fleeing reality. It is at that moment that mastering an image becomes a great physical and intellectual joy.To take photographs means to recognize—simultaneously and within a fraction of a second—both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is putting one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Of all the means of expression, photography is the only one that fixes forever the precise and transitory instant. We photographers deal in things that are continually vanishing, and when they have vanished, there is no contrivance on earth that can make them come back again. We cannot develop and print a memory. The writer has time to reflect. He can accept and reject, accept again; and before committing his thoughts to paper he is able to tie the several relevant elements together. There is also a period when his brain "forgets," and his subconscious works on classifying his thoughts. But for photographers, what has gone is gone forever.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
For me the camera is a sketch book, an instrument of intuition and spontaneity, the master of the instant which, in visual terms, questions and decides simultaneously. In order to "give a meaning" to the world, one has to feel oneself involved in what one frames through the viewfinder. This attitude requires concentration, a discipline of the mind, sensitivity, and a sense of geometry.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Looking at Loh’s photographs, it is obvious that there is nothing simpler and richer than a face when stripped of all effects and affects, poses and postures, stances and pretences. The Singaporeans featured here are almostexpressionless, as if the photographer wanted to leave us clueless about them. What do their faces tell us? Why are they so familiar? Why do we feel we know this auntie that we don’t know? And this guy with the nondescript look? And this girl with no distinguishing mark? Have we met before?
Raphael Millet